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End of the Middle Ages
The '''Late Middle Ages' lasted from roughly 1000 AD until 1453 AD. In the broader sweep of world history, "post-classical period" ''is commonly preferred by historians, instead of Middle Ages, running from about 476 to 1453. The year 1000 is merely a rough mid-point between the early post-classical period and late. The period ends on the eve of the European Age of Discovery; with it, the age of true world history was beginning. Europeans of the late-15th-century knew were belonged to a particular civilization and were proud of it. They were not unique in this; the same was true of men in other parts of the world, which was full of distinctive, self-conscious and largely independent cultures. In China, after nearly a century of Mongol Yuan rule, the ethnic Chinese threw off the ''Mongol yoke with the founding of the Ming Dynasty, who ushered in a long period of stability, prosperity, flourishing of art and culture, and a brief Chinese Age of Discovery with voyages throughout the Indian Ocean that reached as far as east Africa. In Japan, while the emperor and high nobles immersed themselves in the courtly pleasures and intrigues of Kyoto, out in the real world of the provinces, powerful military forces were developing; the Samurai. When Japan emerged from civil war in the late-12th-century, the emperor had been reduced to little more than a figureheads, marking the beginning of Japanese feudalism, characterised by regional warlords and the military rule of the Shoguns. In India from the late-10th-century, wave after wave of Muslim invaders began convulsing its north-western plains, eventually leading to the establishment of the Islamic Delhi Sultanate in 1206. The native religions fared differently; Buddhism declined on the subcontinent vanishing in many areas, while Hinduism survived and reinforced itself in areas not conquered by Muslims. A long series of sectarian atrocities have marred the thousand-year relationship between Islam and Hinduism, but Indian culture was also enriched by new elements, resulting in a flourishing population and corresponding expansion in urbanism, craft production and commerce. European, Islamic, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian civilizations all lived independently long enough to leave ineradicable traces in the ground-plan of our world. Others meanwhile declined and disappeared, even if after spectacular flowerings. Indigenous civilizations in the isolated Americas are credited with many inventions: intensive agriculture, monumental architecture, mathematics, writing systems, astronomy, highly accurate calendars, medicine, fine arts, excellent metalworking, and complex theology. In cultivating the ancestors of tomatoes, maize, potatoes and squash into the crops we know today, the Inca, Aztecs, and their predecessors had unwittingly made a huge contribution to mankind, but their civilisations did not survive the fatal arrival of Christopher Columbus in the 1492. The continent of Africa too boasted a rich variety of civilised development during the Middle Ages, though it has long been overlooked outside Egypt and the Mediterranean coast. A succession of kingdoms in north-west Africa prospered on lucrative trans-Saharan trade. The Swahili city-states of the east coast were an important part of Indian Ocean trade stretching as far away as India and China. And plucky Ethiopia survived as an isolated Christian island surrounded by Muslim powers. Yet all dwindled as the European Age of Discovery disrupted long-standing trade-routes. By about 1453 mankind was probably more diversified than ever before or since, thought the insulation of one civilization from another was never absolute; there was always some interaction of ideas going on. But the age of independent or nearly independent civilisations was coming to a close. The story of the economic integration of the globe is dominated by the astonishing success of one civilisation among many, that of Europe. It was with the modernisation of Europe that the Early Modern Age begins. History China in the Late Middle Ages to realised the ultimate rags-to-riches story, rising from peasant origin to standing atop China alone and unchallenged. Born into a desperately poor peasant family, he was orphaned in his youth and eventually taken in by a Buddhist monastery, where he received a rudimentary education. But at the tail end of the Yuan Dynaasty, Zhu joined a rebel group, rose rapidly up the ranks to rebel general, then took over their leadership, then defeated his rivals, and finally became emperor of China.]] The Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) in China lasted a century. Kublai Khan was determined not to be seen as an outsider in China, even adopting the administative structure of the Confusion bureaucracy. The only difference was the employing of notably more foreigners from throughout the vast Mongol Empire and beyond, most famously the Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo (d. 1324), the best-known of many Europeans to travel the Silk Road from Europe to China. Marco Polo spent 17-years in China, serving in various administrative roles and travelling extensively. On returning to Europe, he was captured by the Genoese at the Battle of Curzola (1298), and it was while imprisoned that he narrated a detailed chronicle of his experience; Il Milione (“The Million”) or The Travels of Marco Polo (c. 1300). Marco Polo spoke no Chinese, only Mongolian, so his understanding of the people is questionable, and a number of curious omissions suggests some was based on hearsay. , but began to crumble almost as soon as its founder, Kublai Khan, died in 1294. The Mongol ruling elite adopted substantially to Chinese culture, making good use of capable native Han Chinese advisors, and administering the country through the traditional Confusion bureaucracy. Beijing was rebuilt as the winter capital, while a magnificent new summer capital was built 200 miles to the north at Shangdu; the "Xanadu" of Samuel Taylor Coleridge fame. Under Mongol rule, foreigners from many advanced civilizations within the vast empire settled in China, who enriched Chinese culture with new elements. On the other hand, the Mongols set up social conventions preventing assimilation with the subjects they now ruled. The population was divided into four classes; the Mongols, a tiny but privileged minority who reserved for themselves almost all the top administrative and military posts; one rung below that heritage from Central Asian steppes was held in high regard; next came the northern Chinese who the Mongols were most familiar with; and the last group was the southern Chinese who had resisted longest. The populace of the south had prospered greatly under the former Song Dynasty, and now provided 80% of all tax revenue, yet they were effectively barred from holding higher office. This financial burder was often squandered by the Yuan in a series of botched military adventures in Japan and Southeast Asia. Kublai Khan left a whole load of sons and grandsons, who squabbled amongst themselves for power, hastening the dynasty's demise; for centuries China had known factionalism at court, mostly fought through political means, but Mongol factionalism invariably resorted to military power. From the 1320, there followed one natural disaster after another, from disastrous droughts and floods, to plagues (including the Black Death), followed by the resulting widespread famines; the classic harbinger of the loss of the Mandate of Heaven. From the 1350s, China resembled all those other times in Chinese history where one dynasty was on its way out, and another was starting to form; a potent cocktail of popular uprisings, secret societies, widespread banditry, and regional warlords openly flouted Yuan authority. In the south, three competing rebel groups began fighting for supremacy, all intent on liberating all of China from Mongol rule. One, centred in the Huai River basin, was under the nominal leadership of a one-time Buddhist monk named Zhu Yuanzhang (d. 1398). Zhus first major coup was capturing the city of Nanjing in 1356, a strategically important city on the Yangtze River. There he began assembling a strong centralised government and greatly strengthened his military power. By 1363, Zhu had cemented his control of southern China, winning out over his rivals at the Battle of Lake Poyang (1363), one of the largest navel battles in history. Five year later in 1368, Zhu was ready to make his move on the Yuan capital of Beijing, which was occupied by Ming forces in September; pockets of Yuan loyalitst continued to resist until 1381. Thus China was unified again under a native Chinese dynasty. Zhu gave his dynasty an appropriately glorious names; the Ming Dynasty meaning "brilliant", with himself as the Hongwu Emperor (1368-98) or "vast milltary power". The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) proved to be one of the longest stable periods of Chinese history; it was also the last of the native Han Chinese dynasties. The long reign of the Hongwu Emperor established the governmental structure, policies, and tone that would characterise the whole dynasty. One of his great successes was in agricultural reform. During the Yuan era, the local landed elites, unable to advance in the bureaucracy, had instead focused on expanding their estates at the expense of the peasantry. From a peasant background himself, Hongwu had the estates broken-up, and redistributed to young farmers, with laws established to prevent landlords from seizing those lands; independent peasant landholders again predominated in Chinese agriculture. When combined with public works projects such as irrigation systems, the result was huge improvements in production and this in turn led to an enormous growth in population. Estimates suggest that a population of perhaps 80 million in the fourteenth century, more than doubled in the next two hundred years, so that there were about 160 million subjects of the empire. Nanjing was the Ming capital through 1403, after which it was transferred to Beijing to be better placed to deal with any Mongol threat. Construction of a new city there lasted until 1420, at the centre of which was a hugely ambitious imperial residence and administrative complex known now as the Forbidden City. Needless to say, the forbidden aspect derives from the controlled access to it; no one was permitted within its walls without the emperor's permission. It served as the ceremonial and political center of Chinese government for almost 500 years. The Great Wall of China was also repaired to effectively protect the northern frontier. Practically all that remains of the Wall today are the parts that were rebuilt during the Ming Dynasty. While it did not totally stop Mongol incursions - they briefly besiege Beijing in 1449 - it had the desired effect of warning of advancing enemies and slowing them down. The first Ming emperor was a distrustful and suspicious ruler. The palace guard were transformed into a form of secret police to root out conspiracies, corruption, and maintain discipline. At one extreme, it led to a series of bloody purges, during which a number of executive bureaucratic offices were permanently abolished. This strengthened the emperor's control over the officialdom, but left him as the central government’s sole coordinator of any significance and something of a bottleneck. At the other extreme, misdemeanors were severely punished, often with public canings. Meanwhile, provincial governments were reorganised with imperial family members placed at their heads. This made the Ming state system, in the view of many historians, well-behaved but rigid and unenterprising, preventing it from being able to adapt to a rapidly changing world. One exception to the otherwise undynamic nature of the Ming Dynasty was an expansion of China's commerce and international trade. It had grown under the Song and Yuan, so that China was now exporting goods around the world on an unprecedented scale, not only along the more famous Silk Road. The Indian Ocean Trade network dated back at least to the 8th-century, connecting a huge number of port-cities around the Indian Ocean basin in a vast maritime trade network, that stretched from Zanzibar, Mombasa, and Mogadishu in East Africa, through Hormuz in the Persia Gulf, Calicut in India, Canton in China, and east to the islands of Japan, Indonesia and Java. Predictable winds made maritime trade incredibly easy, with a well-understood calendar for the seasons to sail east and west. Indian Ocean Trade was incredibly diverse, incorporating many more people than participated in the Silk Road, but for the most part was dominated by Muslim merchants; indeed Islam spread to Indonesia via maritime trade, today the single largest Muslim country by population in the world. In the 15th-century, the Chinese could have changed that balance completely. The third Ming emperor, the vigorous Yongle Emperor (1402-1424), having having usurped power from his nephew and keen to establish his own legitimacy, worked tirelessly to extend China's influence beyond its borders. The Chinese armies undertook five military expeditions into the Mongol steppes, crushing the remnants of the Yuan dynasty that had fled north after being defeated by the Hongwu Emperor, as well as conquering and occupying Vietnam for about 20 years. The Chinese navy was massively expanded, including four-masted ships displacing 1,500 tons. In 1405 he launched the first of seven great maritime expeditions, led by the eunuch admiral Zheng He (d. 1433); a Chinese Age of Discovery decades before the European equivalent. Until 1433, a fleet of unprecedented grandeur and scale journeyed throughout the Indian Ocean as far as the Persian Gulf and East Africa. Their great achievement was to bring tribute missions to the capital, including two embassies from Egypt. Yet they were ultimately a dead end, motivated by Yongle’s vanity to outdo his father, not for the purpose of accumulating information, the establishment of a settled trade network, nor conquest. China had nothing to motivate such expensive voyages, unlike the Europeans with their hunger for spices and other luxuries. International trade would flourish without them, with merchants eager to buy Chinese porcelain, silks, tea, medicine, and other manufactured goods, while selling raw material such as spices, ivory, rare woods, and ingredients for dyes. The emperors who succeeded Yongle dropped anchor on China’s brief experiment in global maritime exploration, and the imperial navy was allowed to fall into disrepair. There were even periods of extreme isolationism when private ocean-going vessels were banned. For a century after the Yongle Emperor, the empire enjoyed a period of relative peace and stability, when the economy and culture thrived. The Ming period has long been esteemed for the high quality of its state-sponsored craft goods, particularly porcelain. The techniques was developed during earlier dynasties, but perfected to new levels of craftsmanship in the Ming era. Though various colours might be featured, the classic Ming porcelain was blue-on-white decor with a rich floral or pictorial emphasis. Made at such noted centres as the imperial porcelain factory at Jingdezhen, and sold across China and to an appreciative world market. By the late 16th-century, kilns were producing wares specifically catering to European tastes, who found them captivating; and still do. Meanwhile, thanks to better manual woodblock and later movable type printing presses, China saw a publishing boom of affordable books on everything from how to live a good life, to commentaries on classic texts for exam preparation, anthologies of poems to informal travel writing. But the most striking development was vernacular novels, produced for those with a rudimentary education, such as merchants and women of wealthy families. Many were adaptations of ancient story that had been part of oral traditions for centuries. The most famous is probably the'' Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with its romanticised tales interwoven with historical figures during the fall of the Han Dynasty. Perhaps the most impressive of all Ming literary activities, however, are works of sober scholarship in many realms. The example was set by an imperially sponsored encyclopedia called the ''Yongle Dadian completed in 1408, an anthology of all the esteemed writings going back to Bronze Age China. This massive work, taking more than 11,000 volumes, was too large to be printed and, unfortunately, most of the original was lost; only around 800 volumes survive by the start of the 19th-century, half of which were lost in the strife the Boxer Rebellion. In the end the Ming dynasty ran to seed. The tenth Ming emperor, the Hongzhi Emperor (1487-1505), was probably the last able and conscientious rulers in the Confucian mode. He was followed by a succession of talentless, pampered, and often erratic emperors, who left the day-to-day running of the state in the hands of favourites, usually court eunuchs. The first Ming emperor noted the destructive role of eunuchs under the previous dynasties, and had forbidden them any role in state affairs, but now they emerged as the dominant factions in government, notorious for their corruption and self-enrichment. Moreover, China's long peace on the the peripheries of the empire came to an end. Vietnam and Tibet both fell away from the Chinese sphere of influence, and the Oirat Mongols, under the vigorous leadership of Altan Khan, were a constant nuisance on the northern frontier; raiding the suburbs of Beijing itself in 1550. At the same time, Japanese pirate raiders repeatedly plundered China’s southeastern coast. Under the Ming, too, the European Age of Discovery reached China, with the Portuguese first establishing trade in 1516. After some initial hostilities, they gained consent from the Ming court in 1557 to settle Macau as their permanent trade base in China. They had little to offer that China wanted, except silver; but Jesuit missionaries followed and the official tolerance of Confucian tradition gave them opportunities they successfully exploited. In the mid-17th-century, the semi-nomadic Manchu people saw the turmoil within China, invaded, and became the ruling Qing Dynasty. Japan in the Late Middle Ages During the Heian Period (794-1185), while the emperor and high nobles immersed themselves in the courtly pleasures and intrigues of Kyoto, out in the real world of the provinces, powerful military forces were developing. The rugged landscape and isolated valleys of Japan where local clan loyalties were strong, always worked against centralised rule. The reforms of the 7th-century which redistributed lands equitably amongst the peasantry gradually broke-down from the 9th, slowly whittled away by noblemen with influence at court, who accumulated private manor estates (shoen) as payment for carrying out their duties. These were effectively hereditary feudal fiefdoms, many exempt from paying tax, that steadily grew as new land was brought under cultivation, or the peasantry was bullied out of their land. Burdened by banditry and excessive taxation, most peasants needed little encouragement to become serfs. Not unlike the Catholic Church in feudal Europe, Buddhist monasteries formed part of this feudal elite, acting no less aggressively in the acquisition of new lands through donations from the faithful. By the 12th-century, at least 50% of land was held in private estates. The provincial nobility, who managed these estates for absentee landlords in Kyoto, were increasingly left to their own devices, recruiting private armies to protect themselves and exploit their neighbours. Gradually, the provincial upper class was transformed into a new military elite, later known as the Samurai. Outstanding among these military clans were two families, the Taira and Minamoto, both connected by blood to the imperial family itself, through a practice known as "dynastic shedding"; barring individuals from the line of succession because, with emperors having as many as 50 children, the imperial family had become too large and too costly to maintain. The two clans were at varying times in political alliance with the central government of the emperor and Fujiwara clan, when it suited them; putting down rebellions, dealing with pirates, or bringing parts of far northern Japan under imperial control. Over time, most local leaders voluntarily allied with one or other of these two prestigious military clans. Almost inevitably, armed conflict broke out between these rivals. It was triggered by a succession crisis between two rival claimants to the throne, that split both the imperial family and Fujiwara clan. The two factions sought the suppose of the Taira and Minamoto clans in the hopes of securing the Chrysanthemum Throne by military force; the Hōgen Disturbance (1156). The Taira clan prevailed, and henceforth based themselves in Kyoto, dominating power at court using the system perfected by the Fujiwara. When the Fujiwara clan tried to rebel against them in the Heiji Disturbance (1160), the Taira again prevailed, effectively destroying the Fujiwara. Over the next 20 years or so, the Taira fell prey to the many vices that lurked in the capital, while the Minamoto quietly rebuilt their strength in the provinces under Minamoto no Yoritomo (d. 1199), a skillful and ruthless commander. Finally in May 1180, Yoritomo invoked the claim of Prince Mochihito, an imperial prince passed-over for the throne, to rally an insurrection. The Genpei War (1180–1185) engulfed Japan in warfare on a scale theretofore unseen. Yoritomo himself spent the early war in the east recruiting vassals from the Minamoto, other military families, and Buddhist monasteries, organising institutions of control and reward, and planning strategy. He relied on his half-brothers and cousins, Yoshitsune, Noriyori, Yukiie, and Yorimasa, to carry the fight against the Taira-led court forces. The Taira enjoyed early success, defeating the forces of Yorimasa and Prince Mochihito at the Battle of Uji (June 1180); Mochihito was killed in the battle, and the injured Yorimasa committed Seppuku, one of the earliest recorded instances of a Samurai's ritual suicide in the face of defeat. With the death of Prince Mochihito and another defeat at the Battle of Sunomata-gawa (August 1181), the Minamoto revolt and thus the Genpei War seem to have come to an abrupt end. The Taira revenged themselves of the Buddhist monasteries that had offered aid to the Minamoto, slaughtering thousands of monks and burning Kofuku-ji and Todai-ji in Nara to the ground. There followed a two-year lull in the fighting, when Japan was ravaged by droughts, floods, famine and plague. Many people blamed the Taira who had slaughtered monks, and noted that Minamoto lands did not suffer as badly. When the war resumed in the spring of 1183, the Taira conscripted a large army from the lands surrounding Kyoto, which were just recovering from the famine, and marched into the Minamoto held Kiso Mountains. But plagued by desertions, one sections of the army was ambushed and routed in the mountain passes at the Battle of Kurikara (June 1183); it proved the turning point in the war. With the clear way for an assault on Kyoto, the Taira clan abandoned the capital with the child emperor in tow, fleeing to their ancestral homeland around the Seto Inland Sea; three days later the Minamoto forces entered Kyoto. In March 1185, the Minamoto seized the Taira island-fortress and make-shift capital of Yashima, in a daring naval assault with a few hundred hardy warrior. The Genpei War came to an end one month later, with the naval Battle of Dan-no-ura (April 1185), one of the most famous battles in Japanese history. The Taira should have had the advantage in understanding naval tactics and the tides of that particular area, but the luck was with the Minamoto; a Taira general defected and revealed the Emperor's ship. As the battle turned against the Taira, in a well-known tragic tale, the widow of the fallen Taira leader leapt into the sea clasping the 7-year-old boy-emperor, rather than have him surrender. This triumph brought to power Yoritomo, the canny and unromantic leader of the Minamoto clan whose relationship with his younger half-brother, Yoshitsune, is a favourite theme of Japaese literature. Yoritomo, by nature a strategist, left the spectacular victories to his brother. Now, in jealous self-interest, he turned on him; when he cornered by Yoritomo forces in northern Japan in 1189, Yoshitsune committed suicide. Yoshitune is the romantic lead in this story, but Yoritomo is the figure of great significance in Japanese history. Upon the consolidation of power, Minamoto no Yoritomo formed the Kamakura Shogunate (1185–1333), the first of various military governments that would rule Japan for the next seven centuries until the Meiji Restoration of 1868. He chose to rule in concert with the Imperial Court in Kyoto, with the former emperor's fourth son, Emperor Go-Toba (1183-98), was elevated to the Chrysanthemum Throne. The new emperor conferred on him the ancient high military title Sei-i Taishōgun, ''the highest honour that could be accorded a general; referred to in the West as the Shogun. In theory Yoritomo represented simply the military arm of the emperor’s government, but in practice he was in charge of government in the broad sense; the emperors in Kyoto were a purely symbolical and ceremonial head of state. He established a new government at Minamoto clan’s base of Kamakura, and was granted the right to appoint his vassals as military governors (''shugo) in the provinces and military stewards (jitō) in both public and private landed estates. It was the job of the shugo to keep strict control over subversives and criminals, while the jitō managed landed estates, collected taxes, and maintained public order. Strains between Kyoto and Kamakura, and between the military elites and aristocracy eventually led to conflict; the Jōkyū Disturbance (1221). However, few warriors responded to the call, the rebellion was easily suppressed, and the Shogunate further consolidated its political power relative to Kyoto. Henceforth, the imperial court was obliged to seek Kamakura's approval for all of its actions, several thousand private estates were confiscated, and the Shōgun's constables were gained greater civil powers. In a pattern similar to contemporary feudalism in Europe, the military rule of the Shogun was made possible by the new warrior elites; the Samurai. Once warfare had given way to peace, they established themselves as a strictly and legally separated hereditary class of local lords, whose status was enhanced by serving more powerful regional warlords. The result was a pyramid of loyalty leading up to the military overlord of Japan, the Shogun himself. With oriental thoroughness, the lord-vassal relationship was a more absolute commitment of loyalty than any practised in Europe. It was formalised as Bushido, ''or “''the way of the warrior”'','' a codes of honour stressing sincerity, patience, serenity, martial arts mastery, and above all the loyalty owed by a man to his lord, with ritual suicide or Seppuku being the ultimate safeguard of a Samurai’s honour. They followed a Spartan, military ideal symbolised by the two swords they carried, and were allowed to abuse commoners guilty of disrespect. Zen Buddhism, a sect of Buddhism that had reached Japan from China in the 12th century, particularly appealed to the new Samurai ruling class, with its emphasis on austerity and self-discipline. It became almost the state religion during the Kamakura period, and influenced some of the most distinctive cultural aspects of Japanese life, such as the exquisite simplicity of Japanese ceramics and polite formalities of the Tea Ceremony. The whole aim of the Shogunate system was stability, and indeed it was able to bring several decades of peace and economic expansion to the country, until one of the greatest threat to Japan’s existence, the two Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281. Under Kublai Khan (d. 1294), the Mongol Empire was close to its peak. In 1368, he sent the first of several letters to the Japanese government warning of this consequence if they did not pay tribute, but both the Shogun and emperor ignored the demand. This only enraged Kublai Khan, who order recently conquered Korea to prepare a great invasions fleet. The first Mongol invasion was launched in October 1274, with about 13,000 troops on some 600 ships. Landing on Kyūshū, the southern most of Japan's four main islands, the regional governor put up a spirited but ultimately futile defence; over 50 years after the last major combat in Japan in 1221, Japanese generals were inexperience in moving large bodies of troops. The Mongols made significant progress on the first day, but retreated to their ships that night to avoid a Japanese counter-attack in the dark. That night the onslaught of a sudden storm sank many of their ships, and persuaded the rest withdraw to Korea; only around two-third of the army made it back safely. In fact this first Mongol attack had been little more than an incursion to test the Japanese defences; even the formidable Mongols could never imagine conquering Japan with just 13,000 men. A much more serious determined attempt was made seven years in 1281. Kublai Khan assembled two massive armadas, one from Korea while an even larger force sailed from southern China, for an overwhelming coordinated attack; Japanese claims of a 140,000+ combined force are likely exaggerated, and about 70,000 is more realistic. The Korea armada arrived first in May, and attempted to establish a permanent beachhead on Kyūshū. Although heavily outnumbered, the Japanese army had fortified the coastal line with two-meter high walls, and repeatedly repulsed each landing. At night, Samurai quickboats or swimmers launched hit-and-run raids on Mongol ships in the bay. To counter these raids, the Mongols began tying their ships together to present a collective defence; a strategy that would in the end have terrible consequences. This standstill continued for seven weeks until the Chinese armada finally arrived in mid-August after a series of delays. At this point, the huge combined Mongol force seemed poised to make bloody work of Japan, but the now-famous typhoon assaulted the shores of Kyūshū for two days straight. The Mongol ships, tied together and often hastily constructed, were keeled-over or smashed apart by the storm. It is said that fewer than one in five survived to limp back to Korea. Thus was born the famous legend that the Japanese were a divinely protected people, having twice been saved by a "divine wind" or Kamikaze. Centuries later during World War II, the divine winds would once again be called upon, this time in the form of suicide pilots who gave their lives to try and protect Japan from invasion. The consequences of keeping Japan on a war footing against the Mongols for years fatally undermined the Kamakura Shogunate. Many loyal Samurai expected to be rewarded for their part in the victory, but the government could not pay; traditionally lands had been confiscated from the defeated enemy, but of course there were none. The disaffection was exploited by an unusually assertive emperor, Go-Daigo (1318-39), who sought to overthrow the Kamakura Shogunate. Things came to a head in 1331, when Go-Daigo openly defied the Shogunate, prompting many ambitious warlords and unpaid Samurai to throw their lot in with the emperor. Among them, the two decisive victories were brought about by the warrior families of Ashikaga Takauji (d. 1358) and Nitta Yoshisada (d. 1338); the former seized Kyoto restoring Go-Daigo to the throne, while the later besieged and took the fortress-city of Kamakura. The collapse of the Kamakura Shogunate after 140 years prompted the so-called Kenmu Restoration (1333-36), a brief and ineffectual attempt to restore real power to the emperor, that was soon confronted with the political reality of military rule. Takauji had no intention of withdrawing quietly back to the provinces, and now expected to be named Shogun. When Go-Daigo refused, Takauji drove him from Kyoto in 1336, installed a puppet emperor, who returned the favour by declaring him Shogun and inaugurating the Muromachi Shogunate (1338-1573); named after the Muromachi district of Kyoto where the government was established. One loose end was Go-Daigo, who fled south with his followers to Yoshino near Nara, and set up a rival court. For the next 50 years, two imperial courts existed in Japan; the Southern and Northern courts. They fought many bloody wars against each other. in which the Northern court usually prevailed. Finally in 1392, Takauji’s grandson was able to broker the surrender of the Southern court, after promises were made and then broken to alternate emperors between the two lines. The Ashikaga Shoguns thus got off to a poor start, and, with few exceptions, were never as firmly in control of Japan as their predecessor. They was able to control the central part of Japan, but gradually lost their influence over outer regions, as provincial warlords carved-up the country into a patchwork of autonomous fiefdoms and waged war against each other; castles and fortresses sprang up around Japan. Perhaps ironically for a period known for its general lawlessness, the Ashikaga made a great contribution to the cultural life of Japan. Villages grew as farmers sought security in numbers and worked together on irrigation projects and building waterwheels that boosted production. Some villages got together to form leagues for their mutual benefit, and commerce and small-scale manufacturing prospered. The state was obliged to find news means to fill its coffers, that often further boosted the economy. Japan renewed contact and trade with China, when the Ming Dynasty sought support in suppressing Japanese pirates. Chinese silk, porcelain, books, and copper coins were popular, while finely-worked swords, folding fans, copper ore, and timber went in the other direction. Moreover, the famous Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavillion) and Ginkaku-ji (Silver Pavilion) were built in Kyoto as retirement estates for 3rd and 8th Ashikaga Shoguns, both of which were later converted into Zen Buddhist temples according to their wishes. It was during this time many elements that we now consider to be quintessentially Japanese first developed: the restrained and precise tea ceremony, ink wash painting epitomised by the work of Sesshū Tōyō (d. 1506), the distinctive Japanese garden style such as the famous Ryōan-ji rock garden, Ikebana flower arrangement, the Bonsai art of cultivating small trees, and their passion for theatre. The style of Japanese Noh theatre and almost the entire repertoire of plays were developed by the father and son, Kanami (d. 1384) and Zeami Motokiyo (d. 1443) who were taken under the patronage of the 3rd Ashikaga Shogun. In Noh the all-male actors sing and dance scenes from legend with an exquisite slowness and solemnity which can nevertheless imply great passion. In the 17th-century, an offshoot of Noh developed into the more popular style of Kabuki theatre. During the last century of the Muromachi Shogunate, Japan descended into one of the bloodiest period of its history; the Sengoko or Warring States Period (1467-1603). This began with the Ōnin War (1467-77), on the surface a succession crisis within the ruling Shogunate, but in truth a conflict between two western military families for control of trade with China. By the time the matter was settled, Kyoto had been burned to the ground, and the influence of the Ashikaga Shoguns declined to practically nothing. Over the next several decades, hundreds of regional warlords fought each other virtually continuously, with no one in particular ever achieving any dominance. One enduring symbol of this era was the Ninja, covert agents, spies and assassins hired by warlords to wag irregular warfare deemed dishonorable by Samurai, although few definite historical facts are known about them. Amid this anarchy, Japan's first contact with the European Age of Discovery was made when three Portuguese traders had their Chinese junk ship blown onto its shores by a storm in 1543. More Europeans followed, bringing with them Christianity and firearms; a game changer. Eventually, one warlord rose above all his rivals; Oda Nobunaga (d. 1582), who set Japan on the road to unification from 1568. India in the Late Middle Ages India's transition the early medieval period to the late is marked by repeated invasions by Muslim groups via the historic north-western routes. The explosive first century of Islam had brought Arab armies along the coast from Persia, to occupy Sindh (modern-day southern Pakistan). The region became Muslim and has remained so ever since. But this area around the mouth of the Indus River, separated by desert from the main body of the subcontinent, was a poor stepping-stone for further conquest. Three centuries would pass before the Hindu kingdoms of north India face the real thrust of Islam. The long-standing threat was renewed in the late-10th-century when an aggressive Turkish dynasty won power in Ghazni (modern-day Afghanistan). In their declining years, the Samanid Sultanate (819–999) of eastern Persia made the same mistake as Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad had with the Mamlukes; they acquired slaves from the Turkic steppe nomads of Central Asia and utilized them in their armies. Well-placed to advance their own interests, they frequently took the opportunity. Sabuktigin (d. 997) was born in what is today Kyrgyzstan, captured as a boy by a rival tribe, and taken to the slave market in Bukhara. There he was sold to a Turkish officer serving in the Samanid army, who was later commander of the district around Ghazni. The officer soon set himself up as a semi-independent ruler, a position later inherited by his now son-in-law Sabuktigin. By the time Subuktigin was succeeded by his brilliant son Maḥmūd (997-1030), Ghazni was effectively a kingdom. Maḥmūd was an empire builder, who turned this tiny provincial city into one of the world’s most glorious capital cities by conquering his neighbours’ territories. The short-lived Ghaznavid Empire soon stretched from Isfahan in the west, to the Oxus River in the east. Maḥmūd also regularly campaigned deep into north-west India, though predominantly raids for plunder which were destructive, but again did not produce radical change. India was the first place where Muslims were confronted with a highly developed cult of idolatry. The profusion of sculpted Hindu gods and goddesses was practically calculated to outrage any attentive reader of the Qur'an; with its uncompromising prohibitions against idols and graven images. Maḥmūd’s raids gradually took on a mood of religious zeal, as seen in the plundering and vandalizing of the great Shiva Temple of Somnath in Gujarat in 1026. It was later boasting in the Muslim sources that 50,000 devotees died trying to defend the temple, the first in a long series of sectarian atrocities that have marred the thousand-year relationship between Islam and Hinduism. The Ghaznavid Empire fractured shortly after Maḥmūd’s death, in the face of the rising power of the Seljuq Turks, and India was granted a respite for several decades. But a foothold had been established beyond the Khyber Pass for countless Muslim adventurers seeking their fortune in India. In 1173, the descendants of Maḥmūd were expelled from Ghazni, by another Turkish warlord, Muḥammad of Ghūr (d. 1206), who began campaigning in northern India, not just to raid, but to carve out territory for himself. Advancing in systematic fashion, he consolidated his position with victory at the Battle of Taraori (1192) against a confederacy of Hindu rulers, and captured Delhi the next year. However, Muḥammad was assassinated in 1206 on his way back to Afghanistan. With his death, the Persian Khwarezm Sultanate was able to take over Afghanistan, and Delhi became the centre of power for his successors. Delhi was seized by a Ghūrid general, Qutb al-Din Aibak, who set himself up as an independent Sultan, the first ruler of the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526). It was during his reign that the famous Delhi landmark, the Quṭb Mīnār Complex was built, containing India's first mosque. His dynasty, known as the Mamluk Dynasty, lasted only until 1290, but the Delhi Sultanate survived much longer under four successive dynasties; Khalji (1290-1320), Tughluq (1320-1413), Sayyid (1414-51), and Lodi (1451-1526). Under the Mamluk Dynasty, Muslim control was consolidated over almost the whole of norther India, conquering rival Sultanates in the Punjab and Bengal, as well as Hindu rulers. It is also notable for the four-year reign of Razia Sultana (d. 1240), one of the very few female rulers in Islamic history. Under the Khalji Dynasty, the Delhi Sultanate began inexorably pushing its borders south down the west coast and into the central Deccan Plateau. At the same time, their successful campaigns in the north west repelled repeated Mongol invasions, saving the Indian Subcontinent from the devastation visited on Central Asia, the Middle East, China, and Eastern Europe. Their empire was not monolithic; Hindu kingdoms survived within it on a tributary basis, almost all the land outside the cities was still subject to some form of control by Hindu chiefs, and strong independent Hindu powers remained on the east coast as well as the Rajputs of Rajasthan. Further south they did not penetrate and Hindu society survived there largely unchanged. The Tughluq period marked both the high point of the Sultanate and the beginning of its decline, due to the overreaching ambition of its second Sultan. This was Muhammad bin Tughlaq (d. 1351), who dreamed not only of extending his indirect influence over southern India, but of controlling it directly as part of his empire. After a series of successful campaigns Tughlaq decided to move his capital to a more central location, so as to more effectively control both the north and south. The new capital was called Daulatabad, on the Deccan Plateau. Tughlaq sought to populate his capital by the forced migration of the entire population of Delhi 700 miles south. Daulatabad quickly proving too arid to support the population, so the entire capital was moved north again. This crazy misadventure caused considerable loss of life and suffering, both from the journey and an outbreak of plague. More importantly, it provoked a series of revolts in the north due to fears the borders would be exposed to invasions. The superb hilltop fortress of Daulatabad stands as the last surviving monument to his folly. From 1336, the empire of the Delhi Sultanate fell apart, as Muslim generals revolted and struck out for themselves, while Hindu vassal kingdoms declared independence. The two most significant successor states were the Islamic Bahmani Sultanate (1347-1527) with its capital at Gulbarga, and the Hindu Vijayanagara Empire (1336-1646) centred on Hampi. The battles between the two were among the bloodiest communal violence in Indian history. The Delhi Sultanate survived in the north, but its fate was sealed by the arrival of Timur (d. 1405), a fearsome Turkic-Mongol conqueror in the style of Genghis Khan; better known in the West as Tamerlane ("Timur the Lame"). In possession of a vast empire in the Middle East and Central Asia, Timur became aware of the weakness of the Delhi Sultanate, and invaded in 1398, on the pretext that it was too tolerant of their Hindu subjects. He marched with his army on Delhi, leaving a trail of carnage in his wake, and mercilessly sacked and plundered the city for three days. Timur had no intention of ruling India and speedily withdrew with his plunder, according to one chronicler to escape from the stench of corpses. The Delhi Sultanate stablised somewhat under the Lodi Dynasty, but was little more than one power among many on the north Indian plain. Nonetheless, Islam was by now established on the Indian subcontinent, the greatest challenge yet seen to India's assimilative power, for its prophetic, revelatory style was wholly antithetical both to Hinduism and to Buddhism. Unlike previous invaders who had assimilated into the prevailing social system, the successful Muslim elites retained their Islamic identity, and introduced legal, administrative, social, and ethical systems that challenged and in many cases superseded the existing systems. The led to the rise of a new Indian culture that was a synthesis of Indian civilization with that of Islamic civilization. An important factor in the synthesis of cultures was that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in India were native Indian converts to Islam played. One earlier sign of this synthesis was the appearance of a new language, Urdu, the tongue of the camp. It was the lingua franca of rulers and ruled, with a Hindi structure and a Persian and Turkish vocabulary. While obviously disruptive during the passing of power from native Indian elites to Turkic Muslim elites, the Delhi Sultanate was responsible for fully integrating the subcontinent into the vast Islamic international networks, spanning large parts of Afro-Eurasia, leading to escalating circulation of goods, peoples, technologies and ideas. On the whole the period was marked by a flourishing urban economy and corresponding expansion in craft production and commerce. Delhi in the 13th-century became one of the largest cities in the whole of the Islamic world, and Multan, Lahore, Anhilwara, Kar, Khambhat, and Lakhnauti emerged as major urban centres. India already had sophisticated agriculture, textiles, medicine, mining, and metallurgy, but it was not as advanced as the Islamic world in terms of mechanical technology; water-wheels, paper-making, and the spinning wheel all became common. Estimates suggest the Indian economy almost doubled in size between 1000 and 1500. The Indian population had largely been stagnant at 75 million between the 1st and 10th centuries, but increased 50% to 110 million by the 15th-century. A distinctive Indo-Islamic architecture style emerged. The types and forms of large buildings required by Muslim elites, often topped by large domes with extensive use of arches, were very different from indigenous Indian styles. Unlike most of the Islamic world, where brick tended to predominate, India had workforce well used to producing stone masonry of extremely high quality. The later Mughal period is generally agreed to represent the peak of the style. On the negative side, the Delhi Sultanate was responsible for the widespread destruction and desecration of idols and temples. In many cases, the demolished remains were reused to build mosques and other buildings; for instance, the Qutb complex in Delhi is said to have been built from the stones of 27 Hindu and Jain temples. Beyond destruction, the Sultans in some cases forbade the construction of any new Hindu, Jain and Buddhist temples, and prohibited repairs of damaged temples or old temples; or granted permission only if the religious community paid a hefty tax. Seizing non-Muslim for the slave-martets in major India cities and in Central Asia was not uncommon. It should be noted that this was intermixed with period when temples were protected from desecration, and there were numerous recorded instances of conflict between between Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain devotees prior to the coming of Islam. Already in decline, Buddhism nearly became extinct on the subcontinent in the 13th-century; with many monks freeing to Buddhist Tibet to escape persecution. Hinduism also underwent profound changes, aided by teachers such as Ramanuja, Madhva, and Chaitanya, who began to treat as a single whole the diverse philosophies and world views that had emerged in ancient India; known today as the six systems of mainstream Hindu. Towards the end of this period, this reformed movement within Hinduism was revolutionised in Sikhism. The founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak (d. 1539), was the son of a Hindu tax collector in the Punjab, which had been under Muslim rule for centuries. In about 1500, he rejected the comfortable life into which he had been born, and left home on a journey of spiritual pursuit; following in the footsteps, two millennia previously, of the founders of founders of Jainism and Buddhism. It was said that Guru Nanak went missing for three days while meditating as usual, and when he reappeared, was "filled with the spirit of God". The message he preached was one of compromise between Hinduism and Islam. He retained the central theme of all Indian religions, escaping from the endless cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation, but rejected two key characteristics of Hinduism; the Caste System and worship of a profusion of colourful gods. He took from Islam the concept of monotheism. In formulating these ideas Guru Nanak made his own synthesis; a religion of love for all men in which the way of achieving eventual release from this world is through faith and meditation on the name of the one and only God. His teaching brought him followers called Sikh ("disciple"), for whom he was Guru ("teacher"). Guru Nanak was the first of the ten Gurus now considered the founding prophets of Sikhism; the first four selected his own successor, and the remaining six followed by descent within one family. The religion became a power in the Punjab under the fifth Guru, Arjan (d. 1606), who compiled the sacred scripture Guru Granth Sahib, and built Amritsar as the holy city of pilgrimage for all Sikhs. The strength of his sect was now sufficient to alarm the Muslim authorities; he was arrested, tortured and executed after refusing to convert to Islam. His martyrdom transformed a contemplative sect into one of passionate militancy. The tenth and last Guru, Gobind Singh (d. 1708), took the step which finally gave the Sikh community the characteristics for which it is known today, the Khalsa; his followers will wear his hair long and uncut (kesh), with a comb in it (kangha); he will wear shorts suitable for fighting (kachha), have a steel ring around his right wrist (kara), and will carry a sabre (kirpan). The Khalsa, and the accompanying commitment to fight for the faith, become the symbols of orthodox Sikhism. All the sons of Guru Gobind Singh died before him, and, with no direct heir, proclaimed that he was the last of the ten Gurus. He named the Sikh holy book Guru Granth Sahib as his successor, making the scripture the eternal, impersonal spiritual guide for Sikhs. The Sultans at Delhi showed no power to restore the former Islamic empire. Only in the sixteenth century was it revived by a prince from outside, Babur of Kabul. Shortly after the first European, Vasco da Gama, arrived in India in 1498, having sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, Babur founded the magnificent Mughal Empire, which at its height covered almost the entire subcontinent. Indian Ocean Trade Long before Europeans "discovered" the Indian Ocean, trading ships were sailing well established routes connecting Japan, China, Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and East Africa. In antiquity, long-distance sea trade operated between the Harappan and Mesopotamian civilizations. The Indian Ocean Trade network began to flourish from the 8th-century onwards, connecting a huge number of port-cities around the Indian Ocean basin, from Zanzibar, Mombasa, and Mogadishu in East Africa, through Aden on the Red Sea, Hormuz in the Persia Gulf, Calicut and Masulipatam in India, Canton in China, and on to the islands of Japan, Indonesia and Java. Predictable winds in the Indian Ocean made maritime trade remarkably easy, with a well-understood calendar for the seasons to sail east and west. Along the way, traders spread culture. Geographically wedging between India and China, Southeast Asia embraced many and varying elements of these two dominant foreign powers. Of the two, India proved the more energetic traders and thus more culturally influential, spreading Hinduism and Buddhism, advances in the sciences and arts, the Sanskrit writing system and sophisticated models of statehood. Of a series of states that arose over several centuries, perhaps the most impressive was that of the Hindu Khmer Empire, which developed in the 9th century. At its peak, it covered most of present-day Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. Its greatest legacy is Angkor, which was the capital city during the empire's Golden Age between the 11th to 13th centuries. The majestic monuments of Angkor Wat and Bayon bear testimony to the empire's immense power and wealth, impressive art and culture. Meanwhile in maritime trade, the powerful Buddhist-Hindu kingdom of Srivijaya centred on Sumatra, controlled shipping through the crucial choke-point at the Strait of Malacca from the 7th to the 12th centuries, and united much of the Malay archipelago, including what is now Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. Srivijaya's capital of Palembang was a flourishing and cosmopolitan trading city. A number of spectacular temple complexes were built in the service of one or other of the Indian religions, including the great shine of Borobudur in central Java. By the 13th century, the trade winds were bringing a new cultural force from the Middle East and India; Islam. It spread slowly and relatively peacefully at first; embracing the faith brought access to a vast trade network throughout the Muslim world. Then the religion becomes rapidly stronger after a Muslim sultanate was established in Malacca from the early 15th-century. By the 17th-century, the new religion was well-established throughout Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Malay peninsula. This period is also marked by the waning influence of Hinduism. The small island of Bali remains to this day the only surviving outpost in the region that retains its Hindu origin, as Buddhism eventually became the dominant faith throughout most of continental Southeast Asia. European traders who began appearing in the Indian Ocean in the late-16th century, and it was the misfortune of Southeast Asia that the legendary "Spice Islands" (the Maluka Islands of eastern Indonesia) was of profound interest to them. Africa in the Late Middle Ages Africa has long been overlooked as a continent were civilisation developed, outside Egypt and the Mediterranean coast. Yet Africa had a diverse variety of civilised development during the Middle Ages, albeit none as impressive as that in the Americas in terms of monument building and writing. In the north-east, Ethiopia was one of the earliest kingdoms to rise to power. According to legend, King Solomon of Israel (d. 931) and the Queen of Sheba had a son, who founded the first Ethiopian dynasty; the state of Sheba is believed to have been in Yemen, 25-miles across the mouth of the Red Sea from Ethiopia. The first verifiable kingdom was that of Aksum (100-940) which became a major player on the commercial route between the Roman Empire and Ancient India. The kingdom profoundly influenced the rest of Ethiopia's history; it introduced Christianity. The Ethiopian church claims that Christianity first reached Aksum during the time of the Apostles. Whatever the truth of the matter, Christianity did not become the state religion until about 330 AD, when St. Athanasius of Alexandria was consecrated the first bishop of Ethiopia.With the rise of Islam on the opposite side of the Red Sea in the 7th-century, trade slowly shifted away from Christian Aksum, and Ethiopia eventually became an isolated island surrounded by Muslim powers. The medieval centuries were one long struggle against Muslim incursions from several directions. The darkest moment came in the early-16th-century when Christian Ethiopia came close to being wiped out by the Sultanate of Somalia, only to be saved by a desperate appeal to the Portuguese, who were already active in the region. On the east African coast, the Swahili city-states grew steadily from the 8th century on trade along the India Ocean Trade network. The merchants from Arabia also brought Islam, which by the 11th century had become firmly established. Between the 13th and 15th centuries, these coastal settlements flourished, including those at Kilwa, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Malindi, Lamu, Mozambique, and Mogadishu. The famed Muslim traveller, Ibn Battuta (d. 1369), visited Kilwa in modern day Tanzania and reported an extremely prosperous Sultanate, busy with trade in ivory, gold, animal hides, timber, and other goods stretching as far away as India and China. A high level of culture extending far into the interior is demonstrated by the remains of mine-workings, roads, and canals. In north-west Africa, a succession of powerful kingdoms in the Niger-Senegal River Valley flourished on the proceeds of the lucrative trans-Saharan trade in ivory, slaves, ostrich feathers, cola nut (containing caffeine and already popular long before the discovery of the New World) and especially salt and gold; two-thirds of the world's gold once came from the region. Complex societies based on trans-Saharan trade had existed in the region since ancient times, but the Kingdom of Ghana (700-1240) was the first major state of its kind. It covered present-day eastern Mauritania and western Mali, rather than the modern state of Ghana, and was well-positioned to dominate this crucial crossroads. Caravans linked the Mediterranean markets to the north with the supply of African raw materials to the south and east, which were otherwise blocked by the Sahara Desert. Islam was spread throughout the region by Muslim merchants; the tribal Moors to the north were particularly early converts. There is no conclusive evidence that kings themselves converted to Islam, but the urban elites recognised that adopting the religion would be beneficial to trade. Ghana's capital at Koumbi Saleh boasted 12 mosques. Islam only slowly spread to the rest of the population, often through the blending the African animist beliefs with Islam. The Kingdom of Ghana began to crumble following the sack of the capital by the Almoravid Dynasty of north Africa in 1076. The decline really set in when other competing trade routes opened up further east in the 12th-century, when the gold field of the upper Niger became more important. This economic power shift was followed by a political change when Ghana was conquered by the even more extensive Kingdom of Mali (1230-1670), stretching from the Atlantic coast to beyond the Niger River. The Mali rulers converted to Islam, and helped spread the faith via such noted centres of learning as Timbuktu. In 1324, the immensely rich Mali king Mansa Musa made quite a stir in the Muslim world when he made the hajj to Mecca. In some accounts, each of 100 camels carried 300 pounds of gold dust, while 500 slaves each brandished a 6 pounds gold staff, along with an impressive human entourage of servants and officials that numbered in the tens of thousands. In an extreme gesture of largesse, Mansa Musa spent and gave away so much gold during a stopover in Cairo that he caused a brief period of runaway inflation in the great city. Even a vague picture of the working of the rest of Africa is hard to arrive at, but remarkable evidence remains of one other dim and shadowy kingdom. Between the 12th and 15th century, the Kingdom of Zimbabwe flourished in southern Africa. The Zimbabwe Plateau offered rich opportunities for settlement, with excellent grassland for grazing cattle, and gold easily acquired from surface deposits, shallow mines, and tributaries of the Zambezi River. Long distance trade is evident from non-African goods which presumably came via merchants of the east African coast, such as Kilwa, 250-miles-away. It produced the only significant building in stone in southern Africa, using granite blocks without mortar. There are ruins of stone or mud houses often 10-meters in diameter and 6-meters high in hundreds of places across modern Zimbabwe, probably for the village chieftain. But the most famous are at the capital of Great Zimbabwe. It is surrounded by city-walls, 5-meter high and 250-meters in circumference, with a 10-meter high watch tower. Within the walls is an acropolis on a natural rise, with the remains of mud housing and the stone foundations of a royal citadel. The Kingdom of Zimbabwe went into decline in the 15th century CE, probably due to its sources of gold being exhausted; when Portuguese captain visited the site in 1531, the city had already been abandoned. African civilisation went into sharp decline everywhere with the European Age of Discovery, as the outsiders seized important coastal settlements, and disrupted long-standing inland trade routes. The Americas in the Late Middle Ages The Spanish arrived in the Americas at the end of the 15th-century to discover civilizations which had achieved much more than those of Africa. These indigenous civilizations are credited with many inventions: intensive agriculture, monumental architecture, mathematics (included one of the earliest uses of the concept of zero in the world), hieroglyphic writing systems, astronomy, highly accurate calendars, medicine, fine arts, excellent metalworking (though not iron-working), and complex theology. This has seemed so improbable to some people that much time has been spent investigating the possibility that the elements of civilization were implanted in the Americas by trans-Pacific voyagers. But there is no clear evidence of contact with any other continent from the time when the first Americans crossed the Bering Straits, except the landings of Vikings in the early 11th-century. These were highly organised and complex cultures, but lacked many features that had long taken for granted in the Old World. They did have the concept of the wheel as seen on children’s toys, but no wheeled vehicles. One obvious explanation is because they had suitable no beasts of burden suitable to pull a wagon or cart; the horse was unknown in the Americas until introduced by Europeans, and while the Andean societies had llamas and alpacas, their mountain habitat made them unsuitable for anything but herding. The fundamental explanation for the slow progress of civilisation in the Americas is geographic isolation. Even contact between Mexico and Peru posing pretty impenetrable natural obstacles; the overland route was blocked by jungles, and neither were particularly strong seafarers. The foundations laid by the first advanced civilisations in the Americas, the Olmec culture (1200-400 BC) of what is now Mexico, and Chavín culture (900-250 BC) of Peru, proved very important. They set a pattern that would endure all the way down to the fatal arrival of Christopher Columbus in the 1492; a succession of highly developed cultures, all strongly influenced by their predecessors, in the same two limited regions. The Aztecs civilisation (1345-1521) were one of the last invaders to move southwards into the valley of central Mexico, in a process that had been ongoing since at least the 10th-century. The Aztecs own name for themselves was the Mexica, which subsequently provided the names for both Mexico and Mexico City; Aztec derives from their original homeland which according to their own legends was called Aztlan, somewhere in the north of modern Mexico. Originally nomads, they were led by their priests to an uninhabited island in Lake Texcoco, where they witnessed a sign from their god to end their wandering; an eagle standing on a cactus devouring a snake. Today the entire lake basin is almost completely occupied by Mexico City, and the eagle-snake-cactus emblem sits in the middle of the Mexican flag. This was probably in the year 1345, and they call their settlement Tenochtitlan. Their prospects in this place, surrounded by enemy city-states, seemed unpromising. Central to Aztec success was a ferocious cult of war. The patron god of the Aztecs was the hummingbird deity Huītzilōpōchtli, a god of the sun and war; a lethal combination. Huitzilopochtli was said to be in a constant struggle with the darkness, and required nourishment to ensure the daily sunrise; his voracious appitite was for human blood. This chimes well with Aztec imperial ambitions: a continual flow of sacrifice victims was needed usually supplied by prisoners of war; death in battle was a route to paradise for the warrior; and reports of their blood-drenched ceremonies strike terror into their enemies. A state of peace in the Aztec empire would have been disastrous from a religious point of view. It has been estimated that there were some 50,000 victims every year shortly before the arrival of the Spaniards. The basis on which the Aztec Empire was built was a three-way alliance with neighbouring city-states, Texcoco and Tlacopan. Toghether they wage war against their neighbours, and brought much of central Mexico under their control within a century. Soon Texcoco and Tlacopan were relegated to junior partnership in the alliance, with Tenochtitlan the dominant power. The centre of Aztec civilization was the capital of Tenochtitlan, on a group of islands connected to the lake shores by causeways, interlaced with canals for transport, with an impressive systen of dykes to prevent flooding. It boasted a population of at least 300,000. The centerpiece of Tenochtitlan was the ritual precinct, where the Great Pyramid rose 50-meters above the city; a stepped pyramid with a double staircase leading up to two twin shrines – one dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, the other to Tlaloc, the god of rain and earthly fertility. This was where most of the human sacrifices were carried out during the ritual festivals, with the bodies of victims thrown down the stairs. Latecomers to central Mexico, the Aztecs were barbarians who took over the fruits of those longer civilized than themselves. The magnificence of their arts, sculpture, architecture, engraving, featherwork, ceramics, metalwork, highly-skilled agriculture, and sophisticated calendar came from the exploited skills of their subjects. Not a single important invention of Mexican culture can be confidently assigned to them. At the head of Aztec society was a semi-divine but elected ruler, chosen from a royal family. He held absolute power but delegated important roles, such as priestly duties or tax collecting, to members of the nobility. They directed a highly ordered and centralized society, making heavy demands on its members for compulsory labour and military service, but also providing them with an annual subsistence. There was an elite professional army, who had a dual role as militarised merchants to help extend the empire and bring goods to the capital. For Tenochtitlán was not only a political and religious centre, but a huge trading centre, with goods flowing in and out such as gold, jade, turquoise, cotton, cacao beans, tobacco, rubber, exotic feathers, tools, weapons, and foodstuffs. At their peak, 300,000 Aztecs presided over a wealthy tribute-empire comprising about 38 city-states, 5 million people, and covering an area of 53,000 square miles. It was never a true territorial empire controlling a territory by large military garrisons, but rather dominated its client city-states by installing friendly rulers, by marriage alliances, and by extending the imperial ideology. The Aztecs did not really mind that their dependencies were only loosely controlled and that revolts were frequent, so that punitive raids could be made upon them at the slightest excuse. This ensured that the empire could not win the loyalty of the subject peoples; they were bound to welcome the Aztec collapse when it came. Religion was also to affect in other ways the capacity to respond to the threat from Europeans, for in their pantheon of gods was Quetzalcoatl, the god of wind and learning. In their belief system, he had gone east after instructing his people in the arts, and would one day return. He is described as fair-skinned, bearded, and wearing a breastplate made of a conch shell. In 1519, the Aztecs welcomed a fair-skinned stranger who landed on the east coast; he was the Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortés. The Mexican peoples had never created a true state; the Andeans got much further than this in the complexity of their government. The Inca civilisation (1418–1533) began as a small city-state in the highlands area of Cuzco at some point in the 12th century. For a long time Cuzco was a small place, one of a gaggle of locally important cultures that followed the collapse of the Wari Empire in the early-10th-century. Expansion took off in 1438, when Cuzco attracted the attention of the warlike Chanka people in the north. While the Inca king fled, his younger son Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui (d. 1471) successfully defended the city against incredible odds. After the victory, he usurped power and spent the next 25 years bringing much of the Andes under his control, through both military might and diplomacy. Rulers who submitted peacefully were allowed to keep their position, while their children would be brought to Cuzco to be indoctrinated into the Inca nobility, then return to rule their native lands. This policy was continued by his son, and by the end of the two long reigns of 55-years, the Incas in control of an empire stretching from a small portion of modern Columbia, through Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, to the Maule river in northern Chile; a distance of nearly 2500 miles. This was made more remarkable by the fact that the Inca never numbered more than about 100,000, yet ruled about 10 million subjects with nearly 100 ethnic and linguistic groups; Quechua became the lingua franca of the region. This was an astonishing feat of government, for the Inca actually tried to integrate the conquered peoples into their empire, rather than ruling through tributary states like the Aztecs. With the king in Cuzco at its head, the Incas became the ruling elite of an empire split into four provinces, themselves sub-divided into districts. Cuzco was transformed into a suitable imperial capital with fabulous monuments in their trade mark fine masonry, which featured unmatched stones without mortar that fitted together with an uncanny and beautiful precision. Moreover, the Inca constructed a series of huge temple fortresses, the most famous of which is Machu Picchu, located high on an inaccessible peak. No less impressive was their system of agricultural terraces to increase the amount of arable land in the mountains, and extensive irrigation works on the desert coast. From Cuzco spread a vast network of road at least 25,000-miles-long, with suspension bridges spanning small ravines, that linked all corners of the empire. Messengers ran between relay stations throughout the empire bearing messages either orally or recorded in Quipu, a code of knots in coloured cords. With this device elaborate records were kept. The structure of Inca society was formidably totalitarian. Land is allotted by the state to peasant families to till for their own needs. The Inca did not operate a substantial internal market economy, and had no currency. Instead the state levied taxes in the form of labour, such as working fields owned by the state, building roads and bridges, or serving in the army. Moreover, peasant communities paid a special tax in the form of a young man or woman, selected to serve the state. Young women served as priestesses, weavers of fine textiles, or in the king’s harem, while young men mainly took care of the Inca's herd (all llamas belonged to the state), or worked in the gold and silver mines. Mortality rates in the mines were prodigious, usually less than two years. In return, the state provided security, agricultural projects, and food in times of hardship through a form of freeze dried potato called Chuño, that could be stored for ten years. Careful and tight control was kept on the population, not merely through force but by the resettlement of loyal populations perhaps hundreds of miles into a region which might otherwise be unruly. Their aim was integration rather than obliteration and they tolerated the local cults of conquered peoples, thought their own patron god was the sun-god Inti. The people living under the Inca seem to have been tolerably content, with festivals and a beer made from maize playing a major part in life. For all its remarkable success, when the European Age of Discovery arrived in 1527, the Inca empire was less than 100-years-old and had not eliminated discontent among its subjects. In 1491, the Americas probably had a diverse population of 100 million people. The Americas contain very varied climates and environments; it is scarcely surprising that it threw up almost equally varied patterns of life. Most people lived a semi-nomadic existence in the traditional manner of hunter-gatherers, but there were more sophisticated groups with a mixed economy of settled agriculture and fishing. Their success was based on farming maize, which spread slowly northwards from the more advanced civilizations to the south, in Mexico. The best-known was the mound-building Mississippi Valley culture, which linked a series of settlements in loose trading networks over a vast region stretching from Illinois in the north to Florida in the south. Cahokia Mounds near modern St. Louis was once an urban metropolis of 20,000 people. More unusual was the Ancestral Puebloans culture which occupied the arid Colorado Plateau. All these higher cultures were already in decline before the first contact with Europeans. Category:Historical Periods